Page:Addresses to the German nation.djvu/154

 more than a link in the chain of appearances may, perhaps, for a moment be under the delusion that he is free; but this delusion cannot hold its ground when he thinks more strictly. Of necessity he thinks that all his fellows are in the condition in which he finds himself. On the other hand, he, whose life is possessed by the truth and has become life direct from God, is free and believes in freedom in himself and others.

106. He who believes in a fixed, rigid, and dead state of being believes in it only because he is dead in himself; and, once he is dead, he cannot do anything but believe thus, so soon as ever he becomes clear in himself. He himself, with all his kind from beginning to end, becomes something secondary and a necessary consequence of some presupposed primary element. This presupposition is his actual thinking, and by no means a merely fancied thinking; it is his true mind, the point at which his thinking is itself directly life. Thus it is the source of all the rest of his thinking, and of his judgment of his kind in its past, which is history, in its future, which is his expectations for it, and in its present, which is actual life in himself and others.

This belief in death, as contrasted with an original and living people, we have called the foreign spirit. When once this foreign spirit is present among Germans it will, therefore, reveal itself in their actual life also, as quiet resignation to what they deem the unalterable necessity of their existence, as the abandonment of all hope of improvement of ourselves or others by means of freedom, as a disposition to make use of themselves and everyone else just as they are, and to derive from their existence the greatest possible advantage for ourselves; in short, it will reveal itself as the confession, eternally reflecting itself in every stirring of life, of a belief in the universal and